Mount Calvary Convent School is significant to Wide Sargasso Sea because it is the first school Antoinette attends in Spanish Town, Jamaica. Mount Calvary Convent School offers Antoinette a place of refuge and security. Before, she feels very alienated from her community; since she is Creole, she is often shunned and made fun of by both Caribbean and English townsfolk. The children in Spanish Town often call her "white cockroach" and mock her for both her skin and her mother. In fact, while she's walking to the convent, she gets bullied and harassed by two children. However, at the convent, she is offered a safe haven when the nuns clean her up and get her settled. It's there that she starts to become her own person and grow into herself more. Project Muse, a scholarly article, writes how it's at the school Antoinette sews a "sure declaration of selfhood" when she sews her name in fire red. They add, "There is no place, it seems, where the Creole woman can know herself and feel at home— no place, that is, but in the Catholic convent.... Thus, this Catholic refuge allows the Creole woman to identify herself with certainty, naming not only who, but also where and when, she is. Wide Sargasso Sea consistently casts Catholicism as redemptive for Antoinette as a Creole woman, variously invoking the racial, gendered, and colonial dimensions of that identity" (Kim-Yu). This information comes from Project Muse, an academic article. Mount Calvary Convent School is to Antoinette what Lowood is to Jane in Jane Eyre. Both places offer the girls a place of security and it's where the two grow into their own persons. It's also where they learn about themes like womanhood, religion, and womanly activities like cross-stitching. This location illustrates Creole identity and belonging because it's one of the first places that Antoinette feels like she belongs, where she's not hated or ridiculed for her heritage or her family, where she simply is. She even states, "This convent was my refuge, a place of sunshine... I felt bolder, happier, more free" (Rhys 33-4). Mapping this location on COVE reveals how the novel borrows, revises, or answers a place of Jane Eyre, since it parallels Jane's time at Lowood.
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